Audience
Educators
Grade Levels
Grades 5-8, Grades 9-12
Subject
Computer Science, Engineering Design, Mathematics, Technology
Type
Lesson Plans / Activities
NASA has been sending robotic spacecraft into the solar system for more than five decades. These mechanical explorers have ventured out to study every planet in the solar system and more, serving as our eyes and ears on their journeys to these far-off worlds by sending wondrous images and fascinating information back to Earth.
But none of these missions of discovery would have been possible without NASA’s Deep Space Network, or DSN – a worldwide system of sensitive antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft.
In this activity, students use their knowledge of coding to create a system that can send and receive radio signals. Students then encode a message into the signal that can be decoded by other students.